1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is in the field of computing devices, and more particularly to the field of mobile computing devices such as tablets, laptops, smart phones, and “netbooks”.
2. Discussion of the State of the Art
In recent years, there has been a remarkable growth in the use and capability of mobile telephones and other handheld electronic devices. Where only twenty years ago mobile telephones tended be large, heavy devices of great cost and one function (making and receiving telephone calls while away from one's normal “land line” telephones), today mobile telephones are general-purpose computers with more power than a high-end workstation would have had twenty years ago. Well-known mobile operating systems abound, and the most successful were all created within just the last few years (for example, Android from Google, iOS from Apple, and Windows Phone 7 from Microsoft), principally because the first several generations were designed primarily as operating systems for telephones.
To understand how singularly transformational the changes in mobile telephony have been, consider that a mainstream mobile telephony device today is equipped with satellite navigation via the global positioning system (GPS) deployed by the United States, as well as accelerometers to detect motion and physical orientation of the device, considerable solid-state storage capacity, high-quality audio systems, long battery life, excellent radio capabilities, fast central processor units, and touch-screen interfaces. None of these features were available even ten years ago. As a result of the impressive power of modern mobile telephones, a very large number of third-party applications have been developed in the last five years that have enjoyed impressive commercial success, and entire industries have emerged along with them (for instance, the mobile gaming software industry).
Inevitably, attention has been paid during these recent years to various forms of integration between mobile telephone devices and computers. The Canadian company Research in Motion created the successful Blackberry™ line of products, which added email and web browsing capabilities to a high-end mobile telephone device and were an instant success. These devices are shipped with universal serial bus (USB) cable to allow them to be connected directly to a user's desktop or laptop personal computer, allowing for synchronization of email between the two devices. Initially, Blackberry devices (and their imitators) were primarily used as phones that also allowed their users to check email while away from their desks; there was no notion of the Blackberry being a principal computing device, as the interface was too difficult and the processing power was not adequate for such purposes. Another early integration between mobile telephony and personal computing that was quickly adopted was the concept of tethering a computer to a mobile phone in order to provide Internet connectivity to the computer while it was away from a physical (wire) network connection. In some cases, a phone such as a Blackberry was connected (again generally via a cable provided with the phone) to a laptop, and then acted as an external modem, providing connectivity to the laptop via the cellular phone network. Later, phone companies and other market entrants began selling special purpose cards that could be inserted into a standard PCMCIA card slot in a laptop and that were equipped with radio circuitry to allow them to join a wireless telephony network (appearing to the network as a mobile phone), in order to provide data connectivity from the laptop to the Internet via the wireless network. These integrations served to make laptop computers (and later “netbooks” and tablets, which took on an even smaller form factor than laptops) more connected when away from their home locations, by giving them the ability to connect via a nearly-ubiquitous mobile telephony infrastructure in developed countries. However, with few exceptions (people who chose to use Internet telephony directly from their computers), users still carried a mobile phone (later generations of which have been referred to as “smart phones”, which term will be used herein to refer to a mobile telephony device with a computer-like operating system, substantial data storage, and the ability to execute applications normally associated with computers more than telephony, using text-based and graphical user interfaces) and a tablet, laptop or netbook computer; the former was used primarily for communications, and the latter for computing.
Even more recently, the capabilities of the processors inside mobile telephones have surged to the point that smart phones are now used as de facto computers by many consumers. There are, as of the last year before filing of this application, a number of smart phones on the market with dual core central processing modules, often more than 100 gigabytes of fast, solid-state data storage, and high-speed data connections via either WiFi hotspots or wireless telephony networks (and generally both). This has resulted in some early attempts to accommodate use of smart phones as full-featured computers, for instance by allowing a smart phone connected to a laptop or tablet via a USB cable to directly access resources on the laptop or tablet, and in another example by providing a smart phone docking station with USB ports so that an external monitor or keyboard, or both, can be used to provide a more usable interface means while leveraging the smart phone as the computer. Similarly, in some cases use of a short-range protocol technology such as Bluetooth™ has allowed connections between smart phones and Bluetooth™ keyboards and other peripherals.
However, for two reasons the natural next step in the convergence of mobile communications and mobile computing has not been taken heretofore. The first reason is that smart phones are still quite new, and have filled new market niches and use cases, and in general have not been viewed as displacing laptops or other personal computing devices. Most users of personal computing devices have developed a range of uses for smart phones, but still use their tablets, laptops and personal computers as their main computing device (in fact, it is only in the last few years that tablets and laptops have themselves come to be seen as having sufficient computing resources to eliminate the need for a separate desktop personal computer). The second reason is that smart phones have not been considered to have anything like the computing power needed to handle mainstream computing tasks, which of course underscored the relevance of the first reason, which can be summarized as “habit of the marketplace”. Today, smart phones are considered to be powerful phones with low-end computing capabilities that fill a completely distinct new set of needs, and not as the future replacement for tablets and laptops, in most vendors' and users' minds.
This disjunction between mobile computing and mobile communications means that most business and mobile consumer users will still use a smart phone (or two), a tablet device such as Apple's IPAD™, and perhaps also a powerful laptop computer; many users are just now adopting the “modern” notion of doing away with the desktop personal computer. This disjunction has a cost, however, in that users must continually struggle with synchronization issues. Files that are downloaded onto one device are not necessarily synchronized with a user's other devices, and keeping emails synchronized between one's various devices can be challenging. The same problem arises with music collections, videos, photos, and so forth. Many ingenious techniques have been developed to address these issues, most of which rely on various cloud-based, or network-resident, services that provide automatic synchronization across multiple devices. While these services are quite valuable (functionally and financially), they generally each address only a subset of the overall problem, and still have drawbacks (for instance, not all devices are connected all the time yet, so there will always be windows of time when devices are unsynchronized).
What is needed is a clear convergence of two very large streams of technology that are at last ready for it: telecommunications and computing. Modern smartphones are already sufficiently powerful to serve as functional full-featured computing devices in their own right.
While they have impressive communications capabilities, of course, they tend to be somewhat balky as user interfaces for many computing tasks. For instance, editing a complex business spreadsheet is not easy on the small real estate of a smart phone. On the other hand, it is likely that tablets and laptops will never replace smart phones as communications devices, because frequently one wants to communicate when it is inconvenient to have a tablet running or a laptop open and a headset on. What is desirable is to have the convenience of a large screen, a touchpad, and easy connection of a large variety of peripheral devices, and the powerful communications capabilities of a smart phone, all available “at hand” when needed, with no synchronization problems to deal with.
It is an object of the present invention, therefore, to provide a solution to this convergence problem by describing a computing device with a removable processing unit, and teaching various embodiments to illustrate how such a device addresses the problems just described.